A study of female homicide:
TWO WOMEN, BOTH KILLERS, DIFFERENT SIGNS
TWO WOMEN WHO MURDERED MEN
One a rich Southern belle whop killed for love; the other, a hardscrabble Yankee, who killed for a job
By now most Americans will have seen this picture of a dowdy middle-aged woman, with a severe page boy haircut and a tight-lipped expression. The dyed-black hair is pulled artlessly behind her Ferengi-like ears; she looks child-like, but pugnacious. Some see in this face the victim of abuse, but we know her as the latest serial killer on the American landscape. We know a lot about Amy Bishop, her brilliant mind; her Mr. Mom husband and her “well-behaved” kids; the “accidental” death of her brother; her beefs with her neighbors and the six people she gunned down on February 12, three of whom are now dead.
Double Aries Bishop did not receive tenure at the University of Alabama, in spite of her winning an appeal against that ruling. She was facing unemployment and a career-ending move. Her anxieties exploded and she went postal on the people she ascertained were responsible.
This was a pattern. She often blew up. She may also have planted bombs in the office of her former employer who had given her a poor performance review. Bishop was argumentative and punitive with neighbors; the Boston-born “Yankee” stood no chance of being accepted in the bumpkin backwater community of Huntsville.
She murdered her brother Seth in 1986 with a shotgun blast to his chest. She then used the weapon in a car-jack attempt to get an escape vehicle. She was never charged in the case, her mother was on the Police board, and convinced the DA, Bill Delahunt, now a US congressman, to drop the charges, in spite of objections from the investigating police.
The similarity to another well-known case is striking. Laura Bush also murdered someone in a 1963 car accident, her ex-boyfriend. Her car rammed the car in which he was a passenger, killing him. She claimed that she did not see the stop sign, and later, that her brakes failed. She was never charged for any crime. Her father was the sheriff of Midland, Texas, where the accident took place.
Two unindicted murderesses with influential parents managed to keep from facing any consequences. But there the similarities end. Aries Amy had to take on the role of breadwinner and head of household, she became the "man" that she was competing against in the job market. She played by those rules, and went things went south, she played her last trump card, death.
Laura Bush, of course, went on to become a trophy wife for a sexually ambiguous and dysfunctional creep from a rich Eastern family. Her choice was well rewarded: first lady of Texas, the state with the highest number of executions of any state, and then, of the White House, as part of a national nightmare that brought us into two bloody conflicts that have lasted longer than World War Two, and killed over 850,000 civilians, wounding an additional 1.6 million men, women and children, as well as bankrupting our economy. She not only rose to the top of the heap politically, but also in terms of bloodshed.
Amy wasn’t as prolific, or rich. As a surrogate-man, as she would have to be in a patriarchal society, she was failing. She tried to support her family and build a career on a professor’s salary, and she had high hopes that her invention of a portable incubator for stem cells would take off. She is an Aries woman, bold, active, willing and able to compete and win in a man’s world, using the same weapons.
Aries are movers and fighters; women Aries are sometimes even more belligerent than the male Rams, since they (rightly) feel women have to be better than men to achieve the same status. Victory over obstacles is vital for Aries, and fighting is also a prelude to sex, the reward. But for Bishop, the reward for playing by the rules and working hard was bumpkiss; her bosses were stealing her livelihood.
Her aspects, however, are the clincher. Uranus is in tight union with Pluto, joined with Mars in imperious Leo. This keg of dynamite is opposed by Saturn, the tyrannical ruler of patriarchy. Uranus wants freedom, Pluto and Mars make that demand nonnegotiable, liberty or death. Saturn’s world view, of subordination and containment, just suppresses the violent energy temporarily, just long enough for Bishop’s anger to grow to volcanic proportions, and finally, to go berserk. She’s a loose cannon.
This bombshell combo is part of a Grand Cross with the axis of her Capricorn Moon’s nodes, so that her sense of her own vaulted destiny would only serve to accelerate her feelings of persecution and isolation. The trines with the Sun would make her more impulsive and go to Code Red on a dime. Bishop did what many men do when depressed, she transformed it into anger and transferred it to anybody she felt wronged her, the ice cream truck driver ringing the bell, the kids playing basketball on her block, the mother in an IHOP restaurant who got the last booster chair, and finally, to the elite group of professors who had rejected her and were about to steal her intellectual property.
Amy Bishop asserted control, she struck back the way a crazy male disgruntled employee would; she gunned them all down in cold blood. She resented those in authority and they finally “drove” her to murder, forcing her to take it to the next level. Unlike Laura Bush, who married money and power, Bishop had her back against the wall. Her husband is her wife; she is the breadwinner, on her own, no safety net.
Laura Bush avoided another breakdown by the insulation that wealth provides. She’s a lucky, charming Libra, who managed to surround herself with opulence. Her velvet glove covers an iron fist, however. With a stellium of planets in Scorpio, it is no wonder George gave up his vices, she controlled him like a smiling ventriloquist does the dummy. Laura killed for love, to avenge her broken heart; her boyfriend jilted her, she retaliated. She, like Bush, is above the law, and her dissonance has left her a dry husk, a desperate smile on her face, all her humanity gone. She is just as scary as Amy Bishop, two control freaks, unable to love.
Amy Bishop killed for money. Money that would have freed her from authority. She ruled her roost with an iron hand, no dissent; she was a gifted thinker and teacher, yet when she felt her world slipping out of her control, she had to restore order with the same violent remedy male killers use. Now, even in her cell, she has forged her own destiny.
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